Stop the Madness

By

E. Fuller Torrey

Updated July 18, 1997 12:01 a.m. ET

Each year, about 1,000 people in the U.S. are murdered by severely mentally ill people who are not receiving treatment. These killings--about 5% of all homicides nationwide--are a testament to the perversity of deinstitutionalization. The emptying of our public psychiatric hospitals, a massive social experiment involving the release of some 830,000 patients, was undertaken on a multitude of flawed assumptions. It's time to reverse course.

Only a small minority of the mentally ill are violent, but many more are worse off...